1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to slide show programs, and more particularly to a system and method to improve the management of speaker notes for such programs.
2. Related Art
Slide show programs have been developed to help a user in creating, editing, developing and managing slide presentations on a computer. Generally, a slide show contains several electronic slides that display information to an audience. Each slide may be presented as a screen or a page output. Moreover, each slide show may contain one or more objects, such as text, graphical images, animation or sound. A slide may also include text usually defined as “speaker notes,” developed by or for the speaker in order to give written support during the presentation.
To initiate a presentation, a user calls the “slide show” functionality to sequentially display the slides contained in the presentation on a computer display or to project it on any other surface. During this operation, the user controls the progress of the presentation by invoking a command to “go to the next slide” and may comment on each current slide, having the respective text of the speaker notes available for support.
Typically, a speaker uses the same slide presentation for a specific audience, using speaker notes only for his personal purposes and providing to participants a set of electronic slides without those speaker notes.
It may also be convenient to have one slide presentation shared between different speakers not having the same native language and thus to have a set of the same speaker notes in different languages.
In present products, a user has to manually manage speaker notes, and when needed, to manually modify the speaker notes associated with each slide of a presentation. The user has to save multiple versions of the slide presentation, and has to edit the speaker notes of a specific slide in each version and modify or remove text, or translate it as required.
The above manual processing presents important drawbacks. The main drawback is that the manual action is performed in a repetitive manner and thus is open to human errors, such as keeping undesirable speaker notes, for example. Another drawback is that the author of the presentation file must manually manage several versions of the same presentation, and the size of the basic presentation file is multiplied by the number of versions on his computer hard disk.
No solution exists to automatically manage a set of speaker notes related to a single slide presentation.